The Podcast
Geopolitics. Scripture. Clarity.
The mechanics behind the headlines — chokepoints, sea lanes, drones and deterrence — read alongside Scripture, without the shouting. New episodes weekly.
with Elias Maren · hosted by Ron Anzevino, creator of author Elias Maren
The Watchman Ethos: Verify before testify.
Latest Episode
Newest first. Every episode streams free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and iHeart.
November 8, 202624 min
com/show/0341mgjXKRUnbuyiTR9zFV If this series has earned it, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts is the most useful thing a listener can do for this work. com/free KHARG ISLAND: THE WATCH BEGINS — The Aegis Directive, Book Seven.
November 7, 202625 min
com/show/0341mgjXKRUnbuyiTR9zFV If this series has earned it, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts is the most useful thing a listener can do for this work. com/free KHARG ISLAND: THE WATCH BEGINS — The Aegis Directive, Book Seven.
November 6, 202625 min
com/show/0341mgjXKRUnbuyiTR9zFV If this series has earned it, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts is the most useful thing a listener can do for this work. com/free KHARG ISLAND: THE WATCH BEGINS — The Aegis Directive, Book Seven.
November 5, 202624 min
com/show/0341mgjXKRUnbuyiTR9zFV If this series has earned it, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts is the most useful thing a listener can do for this work. com/free KHARG ISLAND: THE WATCH BEGINS — The Aegis Directive, Book Seven.
November 4, 202624 min
com/show/0341mgjXKRUnbuyiTR9zFV If this series has earned it, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts is the most useful thing a listener can do for this work. com/free KHARG ISLAND: THE WATCH BEGINS — The Aegis Directive, Book Seven.
November 3, 202625 min
com/show/0341mgjXKRUnbuyiTR9zFV If this series has earned it, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts is the most useful thing a listener can do for this work. com/free KHARG ISLAND: THE WATCH BEGINS — The Aegis Directive, Book Seven.
November 2, 202622 min
com/show/0341mgjXKRUnbuyiTR9zFV If this series has earned it, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts is the most useful thing a listener can do for this work. com/audiobooks/space-edition-completeEverybody knows who tore it up.
November 1, 202624 min
com/show/0341mgjXKRUnbuyiTR9zFV If this series has earned it, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts is the most useful thing a listener can do for this work. com/audiobooks/space-edition-complete Two hundred and twenty spaces.
October 31, 202615 min
com/show/0341mgjXKRUnbuyiTR9zFV If this series has earned it, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts is the most useful thing a listener can do for this work. com/audiobooks/space-edition-complete Eighty on the roster.
October 30, 202615 min
com/show/0341mgjXKRUnbuyiTR9zFV If this series has earned it, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts is the most useful thing a listener can do for this work. com/audiobooks/space-edition-complete Every play on it is real.
October 29, 202616 min
com/show/0341mgjXKRUnbuyiTR9zFV If this series has earned it, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts is the most useful thing a listener can do for this work. com/audiobooks/space-edition-complete It proves the thing can happen.
October 28, 202616 min
com/show/0341mgjXKRUnbuyiTR9zFV If this series has earned it, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts is the most useful thing a listener can do for this work. com/audiobooks/space-edition-complete Raw material is not a player.
October 27, 202616 min
com/show/0341mgjXKRUnbuyiTR9zFVIf this series has earned it, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts is the most useful thing a listener can do for this work. com/audiobooks/space-edition-completeEverything works in shorts.
October 26, 202616 min
com/show/0341mgjXKRUnbuyiTR9zFV If this series has earned it, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts is the most useful thing a listener can do for this work. It is how the watch gets found.
October 25, 202615 min
You won by seventeen. Here are the four plays that almost cost you.
October 24, 202616 min
com/show/0341mgjXKRUnbuyiTR9zFV If this series has earned it, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts is the most useful thing a listener can do for this work. com/audiobooks/space-edition-complete The install is never the problem.
October 23, 202620 min
You grade their film looking for mistakes. The accountability episode, and the close of Season One's twelve-day Global Chokepoints: Space Edition run.
October 22, 202621 min
The close of the twelve-day Global Chokepoints: Space Edition run. Between December 2025 and May 2026, satellite operators moved spacecraft out of the way of something more than 207,000 times.
October 21, 202614 min
com/show/0341mgjXKRUnbuyiTR9zFV If this series has earned it, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts is the most useful thing a listener can do for this work. It is how the watch gets found.
October 21, 202616 min
Rules meetings. Bad coffee, folding chairs, a projector nobody could get to work.
October 20, 202616 min
About fifteen hundred flights a day were receiving a counterfeit satellite navigation signal — not jammed, not missing, counterfeit. Earlier that same year the number was around three hundred.
October 19, 202617 min
Two Chinese missions slipped this year. In August, Chang'e-7 — the flagship lunar south pole prospector — no longer met the conditions for its launch window, with no official cause given and no new date.
October 18, 202618 min
Overnight on 13 October, a speed restriction took effect on the military satellite network Ukraine uses for battlefield communications. A speed limit on a satellite link is a limit on how fast a drone can be flying and still stay connected.
October 17, 202616 min
Earth and Mars line up for an efficient transfer roughly once every 26 months. The next window opens in November and closes about thirty days later.
October 16, 202617 min
After five days of reporting that things in space are further away than people think, this one runs the other way — and keeps a promise made on air. Autonomous decision-making in orbit is already operating at a scale almost nobody registers: 207,152 collision-avoidance manoeuvres in six months, executed without human approval.
October 15, 202617 min
Two well-funded asteroid mining companies failed without ever launching a mission to an asteroid — one of them acquired by a blockchain company in 2018. The third lost contact with its spacecraft twenty hours after deployment, and titled its public debrief Odin't .
October 14, 202616 min
Water becomes hydrogen, hydrogen becomes fuel, fuel becomes power. It is the most repeated chain in space commentary.
October 13, 202615 min
Geosynchronous orbit is about 22,000 miles up. The Moon is about 239,000.
October 12, 202614 min
There is no dark side of the Moon. The far side gets as much sunlight as the side we see.
October 11, 202615 min
Some time this autumn, Shenzhou-24 is expected to carry the first foreign astronaut ever to board a Chinese space station — a Pakistani, for about a week. Every Tiangong crew before this one has been Chinese.
October 10, 202615 min
On October 1 a Crew Dragon made what may be the fastest American trip to the International Space Station ever flown — about seven hours and fifty minutes. It docked with a structure that has been losing air through cracks in the Russian Zvezda module since 2019.
October 9, 202614 min
This week on this programme: rocket artillery into Nome, a kill chain over the Bering Sea, a $400 million pier, three icebreakers. All of it on a coastline where about 60,000 people live.
October 8, 202614 min
The United States operates one heavy polar icebreaker. She entered service in 1976 with a thirty-year design life.
October 7, 202616 min
In February, NORAD launched nine aircraft to meet five Russian aircraft in the Alaskan air defence zone — and then said, in writing, that the activity occurs regularly and is not seen as a threat. Both halves of that are the story.
October 6, 202614 min
Nome, Alaska has about 3,500 people, and its harbour serves 60 more communities across western and northern Alaska. There is no road to Nome.
October 5, 202613 min
Somewhere in the American military right now there is a weapon that could select its own target, and does not — because a policy document says it may not. The restraint is real.
Listen on Spotify →October 5, 202614 min
An undersea cable never touches a satellite. No wire climbs to orbit.
Listen on Spotify →October 2, 202612 min
A British security firm got a Chinese AI model to produce material on biological weapons, assassination planning and malware — then withheld the method and gave the company six weeks before going public. No method detail is discussed in this episode.
Listen on Spotify →October 2, 202612 min
Since 2004, two strands of glass have connected Svalbard to mainland Norway. Laid in pairs — because in the Arctic, one of anything is none of anything.
Listen on Spotify →October 1, 202614 min
On Wednesday morning a Boeing 737 left Dubai for Tel Aviv with 174 people aboard, 27 of them children. Over the Arabian Peninsula the captain was stabbed in his own flight deck.
Listen on Spotify →October 1, 202614 min
Three men from outside the Pentagon will spend 120 days determining what the United States military should build for the wars of the coming decades. Two of the three run companies that sell to the Pentagon.
Listen on Spotify →October 1, 202611 min
Russia's Northern Sea Route carried 37 million tonnes last year. The headlines call that a shipping revolution at the top of the world.
Listen on Spotify →September 30, 202610 min
Beneath the polar ice runs a mountain range no human eye has seen — roughly 1,800 kilometres of continental crust from the Greenland–Ellesmere region to the Siberian side of the Arctic Ocean. Three nations have spent two decades and thousands of pages arguing it belongs, geologically, to them.
Listen on Spotify →September 29, 202611 min
A rocket the height of a twenty-storey building left south Texas with thirty-nine engines burning. One of them quit.
Listen on Spotify →September 29, 20269 min
In 2007 a Russian submersible planted a titanium flag on the seabed at the North Pole, 4,200 metres down, and the headlines called it a land grab. Nearly two decades later nobody owns the North Pole — and under the law that actually governs the Arctic, planting a flag earns you nothing.
Listen on Spotify →September 28, 202611 min
Two fiber-optic cables lie on the floor of the Arctic Ocean — 1,400 kilometres each, in places 2,700 metres down. They feed the world's largest commercial satellite ground station.
Listen on Spotify →September 28, 202610 min
Eighty-four days. That is how long a tanker called the Valentin Pikul sat alongside a pier above the Arctic Circle, waiting to be filled.
Listen on Spotify →September 25, 20269 min
Two months of straits and canals and undersea cables — and the tightest chokepoint in the whole framework turned out to be thirty-five miles up the road. One mill in Butler, Pennsylvania makes the only domestic supply of the electrical steel inside every large transformer in the country.
Listen on Spotify →September 24, 20269 min
Fifty-six thousand people. That is the population of Greenland — the size of a county seat.
Listen on Spotify →September 23, 202613 min
S. agencies named six Chinese AI companies and accused them of industrial-scale distillation against American frontier models.
Listen on Spotify →September 22, 20267 min
Two hundred and forty-one Americans died in Beirut in October 1983. Michael Donnelly is not one of them.
Listen on Spotify →September 22, 20267 min
A country can sit on more crude oil than it knows what to do with and still not be able to fill a tank. Crude oil is not fuel — and every instrument we built to secure energy protects the barrel, not the ability to turn it into something usable.
Pairs with Strait on Fire — Global Chokepoints Book One
Listen on Spotify →September 21, 20269 min
A utility ordering a large generator step-up transformer today is being quoted delivery in 2029. Five years ago the same unit shipped in fifty to eighty weeks.
Listen on Spotify →September 21, 202611 min
Every chokepoint this show has covered had somebody doing it. Somebody closed the strait, set the toll, dragged the anchor, jammed the signal.
Listen on Spotify →September 11, 20269 min
Thirty-six days before it happened, somebody wrote it down. The President's Daily Brief of August 6, 2001 carried a title requiring no interpretation: Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.
Listen on Spotify →September 8, 202611 min
A ship dragged its anchor across three hundred kilometers of Baltic seabed and cut two cables. Measured impact: little to none.
Pairs with Shadow Axis — Nations in the Valley Book Three
Listen on Spotify →August 21, 202615 min
The United States is in confrontation with three major powers at the same time. That has not been true since the 1940s.
Listen on Spotify →August 18, 202612 min
A public correction: the Silicon Shield isn't eroding for the reason I first argued. The mechanism is worse — and more deliberate — than 'nobody's in charge.'
Pairs with The Taiwan Tripwire — Global Chokepoints Book Two
Listen on Spotify →August 18, 202611 min
Closing a strait is a blunt instrument. It hurts you almost as much as everyone else, and the world unites against you because the world has no other option.
Pairs with The Tehran Toll Booth — Global Chokepoints Book Eleven
Listen on Spotify →August 13, 202611 min
The Taiwan semiconductor deterrent was never designed — and it's being eroded one individually-correct business decision at a time.
Pairs with The Taiwan Tripwire — Global Chokepoints Book Two
Listen on Spotify →August 10, 20269 minBonus
A bonus episode on open-source intelligence — how a woman with a pencil and a composition notebook saw what a nine-figure intelligence budget could not.
Pairs with Silent Mandate — Aegis Directive Book Two
Listen on Spotify →August 10, 20268 minBonus
A bonus episode on restraint as doctrine — why taking a threat apart quietly usually beats destroying it loudly, and what it costs the man who chooses.
Pairs with The Architect — Aegis Directive Book Five
Listen on Spotify →August 5, 202610 min
One shipping route between Asia and Europe, two locks, no third door — why Suez and Bab el-Mandeb are one story, not two.
Pairs with Shadow Axis — Nations in the Valley Book Three
Listen on Spotify →August 4, 202610 min
A drone cheaper than a used car forces a navy to spend the price of a house to stop it — an arithmetic problem no navy has solved.
Pairs with Silent Swarms — Nations in the Valley Book Four
Listen on Spotify →August 4, 202610 min
The strait closes not by blockade but by insurance — the mechanism that shuts a sea lane with no order given and no shot fired.
Pairs with Hormuz — Nations in the Valley Book Two
Listen on Spotify →Narrated using digital voice technology, including a voice model of the author.
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Every episode has a book behind it. Hormuz, the Red Sea, the drone arithmetic and the silicon shield are the same research that built the Global Chokepoints series; the Vale bonus episodes come straight out of the Aegis Directive. The podcast is the briefing. The books are the file.
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